“That wouldn’t happen to be the same President Obama who was afraid to go on Fox, would it?” Carson said with a laugh, during an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily.

“Must be a different guy,” said Carson, who recently topped a NBC News/WSJ poll. “That’s just ridiculous,” he added.

Late Monday, Obama taunted the GOP candidates for withdrawing from the planned NBC debate. “They say, ‘When I talk to [Russian president Vladimir] Putin, he’s going to straighten out’ … and then it turns out they can’t handle a bunch of CNBC moderators,” Obama scoffed.

Carson dismissed Obama’s heckle. “I think [there’s] universal accord on the idea that CNBC was way off base with that [October] debate.” Carson said.

“Do you face the problem head-on? I believe in facing problems head-on,” he added, referring to the collective decision by GOP candidates to withdraw from NBC’s planned debate. NBC is the parent company of CNBC.

Carson also went after pundits who didn’t view him as a serious candidate. “They’ve been wrong from the very start… they’re not used to this,” he said.

“Anything I say they try to jump on,” Carson told Breitbart’s Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon, host of Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM Channel 125. “Unfortunately for them, the people are paying attention.” Carson said he has enthusiastic people waiting in lines for five to six hours at his book signings and various events to meet him.

He also criticized out-of-control spending by politicians in Washington, D.C. “The only reason we can sustain those [spending] levels is because we can print money,” he said. The national debt and spending must be addressed or else there will be an “economic collapse,” he added.

“It’s going to be massive,” he warned. “If I were president, we would never get to that level” of debt and spending,” Carson said. “You start dealing with the budget cycle early on, so you don’t reach the point” where you don’t have to reach a debt ceiling, Carson explained.